Science AMA Series: Hi Reddit! We’re Rodolfo Dirzo, Wägele J. Wolfgang
and Christian Schwägerl, and we’re talking about the rise of global
insect decline and why it matters - Ask Us Anything!
Abstract
Hi reddit! My name is Christian Schwägerl, and I write for Yale
Environment 360 magazine. In my work as a journalist and book author, I
have covered science, environment and politics for more than 20 years.
In recent years, my main focus is the Anthropocene, the now widely known
idea that our human impact on Earth is not only profound and global, but
also long-lasting enough to be put on the geological time-scale. My book
“The Anthropocene” (Synergetic, 2014) explores pathways towards an
Anthropocene that is better than today’s destructive and degenerative
practicies. In my recent Yale Environment 360 investigation, “Vanishing
Act: Why Insects are declining and why it matters”, scientists Rodolfo
Dirzo and Wägele J. Wolfgang join me to understand why the dwindling
insect populations was really disconcerting in this respect. Not only do
insect populations decline, but monitoring and research fall far behind
what would be necessary to really understand and address the problem.
Like with so many other things we take for granted, the small and
invisible is hugely important. An extinct bug might make most people
shrug. But our lives depend more on healthy insect ecology than we
think. In future articles, I want to explore the huge importance of
small organisms further. My name is Rodolfo Dirzo and I am an ecologist
at Stanford University. My work examines the study of species
interactions in tropical ecosystems from Latin America and Africa. My
recent research highlights the decline of animal life (“defaunation”),
and how this affects ecosystem processes/services. I developed a global
index for invertebrate abundance that showed a 45 percent decline over
the last four decades, published in 2014 in Science, “Defaunation in
the Anthropocene.” My name is Wägele J. Wolfgang and I am a biologist
and Director of the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany. With
the help of my team, I have developed a plan for an automated
biodiversity surveillance system, which would photograph, videotape,
capture, or audio-record animal and insect species and perform automatic
analysis of species richness and abundance. We have weather stations for
climate research all over the country, so we want to add a dense network
of biodiversity stations so we can measure automatically how much life
there is in our landscapes. We plan to use automated identification
techniques, either through artificial intelligence image analysis or
genetic fingerprinting, or by matching acoustic recordings with data
collections. This system could collect, identify, and record species
data 24/7 and gather data we desperately need to assess the decline of
insects. We will be answering your questions at 11am EST – Ask Us
Anything!